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HUST President’s View on Wuhan Development Strategy

October 1, 2017

HUST President’s View on Wuhan Development Strategy

“The idea of building Wuhan into a ‘university city’, a ‘youth city’ and ‘innovation city’ is the right decision because Wuhan has the advantages to do this.” said President Ding Lieyun from Huazhong University of Science and Technology on an interview with the reporters from Changjiang Daily recently.

According to President Ding, hosting around one million college students, Wuhan is highly identified as a city of higher education and scientific research. There must be at least one college student in every ten people, which makes Wuhan a perfect city to be named the “university city” and the “youth city”.

By building the “dream city” and the “innovation city”, millions of young college students would choose to work in Wuhan. College students, with higher education, are the people to make difference, so we must keep these talents and help them develop. They are the new force of the future of Wuhan.

Point 1: The industry adjustment needs more talents.

“Wuhan has many advantages to attract and host the talents.” said Mr. Ding, the city is advantage in lower living expense, less start-up capital, and what’ s more important, a good storage of college students. These explain why so many big companies set up their incubators here.

Comparing with those old industry bases as Shenyang and Changchun, Wuhan has successfully finish her industry structure upgrade. Today photoelectron, biological pharmacy and other newly developed industries flushed into the city, which is also a great incentive to talent attraction.

Ding analyzed the characteristics of college students in Wuhan. He thinks that the college students here are very responsible for their jobs, they would not easily change their jobs. “This is also an advantage of Wuhan because being innovative is a spontaneous thing, you shouldn’t give up at half way, if you did, then you won’t succeed.”

Point 2: Build a new Zhongguancun in Wuhan

The innovation and entrepreneurship policies in Wuhan are very good. The Gold 10 Rules issued by the municipality has casted positive impact on the transformation of scientific and technological achievements both for college students and the scholars.

Besides, scale and brand development are important to the innovation and venture bases. Local government should provide professional service and build a good entrepreneurship culture and atmosphere so we can build our local “Zhongguancun”.

Taking HUST as an example: now a 180,000㎡ innovation and entrepreneurship base is under busy construction, which will provide a series of professional services including venture capital, science and technology broker, lawyer service, accounting service, patent filing, company registration and so on. “We really hope to develop the base into a base like Stanford University, which can provide great many of innovation and entrepreneurship talents for the optical valley area.”

Ding suggested that talent incubation is equal important. We should encourage more people to be makers, help the makers to achieve their goal, only by doing these things can we build a professional integrated chain of entrepreneurship service circle.

Building a national science center in Wuhan is also part of Ding’s strategy. He thought that the national science center is an agglomeration of scientific infrastructures and a gather of high-quality talents, which will have a long-term influence on the cultivation of innovation and entrepreneurship culture, thus attracting more college graduates to stay in Wuhan to form a benign circulation.

Recently, besides WNLO, there are another two major fundamental scientific research projects under construction in HUST, one is the strong pulse magnetic project and the other one is the precision gravity survey project. Once put into use, they can provide job positions for a lot of people and they can also help the talents-relating entrepreneurships to develop.